Published: July 21, 2008 10:14 pm      

Former Johnstowner builds his own plane

MONTE VISTA, Colo. — Ever since he was a small child in Johnstown, physician assistant Capt. Jack Bilak has loved airplanes.

Bilak, who served as a flight medic in the Vietnam War, recently put the finishing touches on The Anneliese Mae Browning, an airplane that took almost seven years to build.

“I figured it would be done in three years, not 61/2,” said Bilak, who began the project in October 2001. “Medical school was much shorter.”

And it’s not like Bilak took prolonged breaks here and there.

No, he worked on Anneliese, named for his late granddaughter, almost every day for 81 months at his Del Norte, Colo., home and at the Monte Vista Airport.

When it came to the fuselage, the body of the plane, it took Bilak two weeks just to inventory the pieces.

“One of my goals was that I wanted the plane to look like it came out of a factory, and not a garage,” Bilak said of the plane that needed 14,000 rivets to be pieced together.

Anneliese, which will have a top air speed of 230 mph, will be examined by a federal inspector in the coming weeks. If all goes as planned, Bilak then will have his airworthiness license, meaning he can fly the plane.